End-of-Year Spending Toward the End of the Tunnel

By Ann Lehue, MSIS, Senior Manager, Collection Development

Balancing the budget the last few months of the fiscal or calendar year presents challenges, with variations in stock, invoicing, and publishing dates even in a “normal” year, let alone a year with supply-chain issues and uncertainty on every front. The primary challenges in year-end-spending as we wait to see if the light at the end of the tunnel is the sun or a train will be spending your budget quickly in a forward-looking way and filling in gaps created—or brought to light—during the past year.

Quickly identify and fill diversity gaps with an iCurate®  inClusive purchase

Books offer children and adults mirrors to see themselves in what they are reading, and windows to see others in what they are reading (Rudine Bishop). According to School Library Journal, almost 95% of librarians agree that having a diverse collection is either important or very important.

With iCurate inClusive, a library purchases a one-time assessment of the diversity of their holdings, they email their holdings EANS to Ingram, and within two weeks, they receive eye-catching reporting on the diversity of their collection for their library board or funding agency, along with lists of the diverse titles they are missing that are most popular in public libraries.

Our Collection Development librarians have been marking diverse title distinctions in our databases as we work titles that feed in from publishers every day for more than a decade so that we can identify as many quality diverse titles as possible, both when providing this service and when creating all other lists and projects.

The purchase, which can be billed before the end of the fiscal year, regardless of when you are ready to complete the project, comes with the following:

• More than 60 charts and graphs showing the diversity of your collection compared to the top 5% of titles sold into public libraries to provide context in each subject area, age range, and overall collection, including the following diversity categories: 
  

          Diversity categories are based on interest and content rather than solely on author identification, which is not always readily available, accurate, or discernable. 

• Excel spreadsheet with 24 subject breakouts that includes number of diverse titles currently in your collection in each diversity category

• Shoppable lists of the diverse titles that are most popular in public libraries, with your holdings (title/author match) and the diversity codes marked, to facilitate filling in any gaps identified so that you can take immediate action:

• Links to the iCurate Complimentary Diverse Title Lists provided within ipage for ongoing support.

All this reporting and the lists of diverse titles will arrive in two weeks rather than over a period of months or years and will save possibly hundreds of hours of payroll time. It will also allow libraries to quickly fill in gaps before the end of the fiscal year so that their communities benefit almost immediately. The $4,200 one-time fee for All Ages or $1,500 each for Adult, Children’s, or Teen can be billed within days to make sure you are invoiced by your rollover date. Customers who have already purchased iCurate inClusive can follow up with iCurate inCremental, which shows previous results, public library average, and new results so that you can see your progress.

Avoid future gaps, save time, and spend your budget quickly with an iCurate Coming Soon subscription

Another way to avoid gaps, save time in case you have cuts next year, and focus on getting reopened or on selecting more local titles is by subscribing to iCurate Coming Soon and receiving monthly hand-selected lists of forthcoming titles over the next 12 months. Featuring far more than simply the bestsellers, this annual subscription offers three size options by category so you can efficiently maintain a relevant collection. You can subscribe to Adult, Children’s, and/or Teen lists in either small, medium, or large—there is no price difference between sizes. The subscription is $775 per year for each age group, or you can subscribe to all three for $2,100. This will bill on the first of the month after subscribing. If you need earlier billing, we can work it out if you contact Ann.Lehue@ingramcontent.com.

Your enrollment includes a bonus easy-deduping feature that removes EANs that you hold, have on order, or have in another list already. Simply click on the left filter bar and select the duplicates that you want to include or exclude:

This feature is good across ipage, not just within the Coming Soon lists.

To get started, click on Curated Lists>iCurate Coming Soon/Get Started and follow the instructions. You will be billed and receive your first set of lists on the first of the month. The lists include a catch-up list of all the titles that have run on the program that have not yet published, which will help fill in those gaps and year-end spending.

Fill gaps and spend your budget with an iCurate Core Gap Analysis purchase

Libraries with gaps already or who want to do a gap analysis on their collection while they have some end-of-year funds may want to fill them by purchasing iCurate Core. Sometimes budgets get slashed for a while, we are closed for an extended period of time during a pandemic (hopefully only once in a lifetime), we lose a selector and can’t catch up, or a librarian leaves and we discover that they have only been buying their favorite authors or section. Sometimes we take over a collection and simply want to know where to start.

Ingram’s Collection Development librarians have all worked in public libraries and have struggled with these issues first-hand. The iCurate Core: Essential Collection Gap Analysis for the public library allows a library or an adult, teen, and/or children’s area to rebalance their collection with a one-time list suite of essential titles that they are currently missing – whether classics, evergreen standards, or new releases. We compare your holdings (author/title match) to the lists to let you know which titles you do not currently own.

These lists provide a starting place to show which essential and currently popular titles are missing so that you do not have to spend weeks or months analyzing the collection and searching for replacement titles to order. They can also be used after weeding to replace essential items that got pulled because of condition. Each set of lists (Adult, Teen, Children’s) costs $1,000… get all three for $2,800. We can bill the next first of the month, or sooner if needed for fiscal year purposes.

Spend your budget with a Proforma Invoice

Many libraries can put a specific amount of money on their accounts for future spending—called a proforma invoice. This is a great way to pay now to avoid losing 2022 funds and to order titles later when you have more time and things have settled down in the publishing world, or to supplement an upcoming budget cut. If you are interested in a proforma invoice, contact your sales rep to get started.

Spend your budget with iCurate Complimentary: Hand-curated ipage lists

iCurate Complimentary includes thousands of hand-selected lists available without charge to customers on ipage in the Curated Lists tab. These lists are broken down into Adult, Children’s, Teen, Audiovisual, Award & Noteworthy, and K12 and are updated regularly: weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on type of list.

Because we have the best inventory in the business, we can fill your orders in a timely manner to meet your end-of-year budgeting needs.

Our lists receive tens of thousands of views and downloads each month and include High Interest Title Selections (HITS) of the most anticipated forthcoming titles in each area, Top Titles Lists to help fill in gaps after weeding or during regular maintenance, and much more. Our Virtual Book Display sections feature trending and timely topics, such as Baking for Any Mood, Girls’ School Fiction, and Holiday Celebrations, while our Subject Lists feature regularly updated topics always of interest, such as English Language Learning, Nonfiction Classics & Essentials, Homeschooling, In the News, Movie/TV Adaptions, and many more. For those preparing for summer reading, we have posted lists for Summer Reading Club 2021.

We recognize the need for more diverse books and create regularly updated lists of diverse titles, such as Asian Interest, Black Interest, Diverse Families, Income Inequality, Indigenous Interest, Latinx Interest, LGBTQIA+ Interest, Mental Health, Middle Eastern Interest, #ownvoices, Serious Illness, Social Emotional Learning, Spanish Language Books, and Special Needs.

For customers who like to find titles serendipitously in ipage and are in a hurry, we have created an “Expertly Curated” icon that appears under a title in your Search Results or Selection Lists that indicates that a title is in one or more of our Curated Lists. Within the title detail page, you can view the lists that the title appears on and click straight into any of the featured lists. So if you were interested in the book Little You because you were looking for Indigenous Peoples Board Books, you could click straight into the Indigenous Peoples Board Books Curated List and instantly find several other quality titles.

If you need to receive titles by the end of your fiscal year, you can sort the lists by availability and order those showing in stock at your primary and/or secondary warehouse

‍ Have questions? We are here to help! To set up an individual session to chat with your sales rep, click HERE. In times of struggle and in times of hope, libraries are instrumental, and we are here for you.